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Power Primitives

PHP arrays and strings with the fluency of modern collection APIs

Why Power Primitives?

Plain PHP arrays and strings are wonderfully flexible, yet they quickly turn into walls of procedural helper calls. Loop counters, temporary variables and manual checks for missing keys clutter the happy path of your application.

The PowerArray and PowerString classes wrap native values in a lightweight object-oriented facade that embraces PHP 8 and makes common transformations readable, chainable and safe.

No temporary arrays, no custom utility library scattered throughout your project — just fluent, discoverable methods that compose naturally.

Installation

Requires PHP 8.1 or newer (tested up to 8.4-dev). The package ships with a self-contained test runner, so no external dependencies are required to verify your installation.

A tour of PowerArray

Create an instance with PowerArray::of() (copying data) or asPA() for a zero-cost wrapper around an existing array. From there you gain a toolbox of methods grouped into categories:

Construction & inspection

• of, on, cast, and helpers PA, asPA, toPA for flexible wrapping.
• all, first, last, count, getIterator expose the underlying data.
• Native ArrayAccess support lets you interact using $array[$key] syntax.

Transformation & chaining

• append, prepend, merge, stripFirst, stripLast, splice, slice, reindex and sort reshape the structure fluently.
• map, mapColumns, reduce, repeat, join, toClass, hidrate, toLowerCase (via PowerString) and joinRecords help you build pipelines without leaving the method chain.

Filtering & searching

• filter, find, findAll, missing, indexOf, binarySearch, orderBy cover common lookup patterns with optional strict comparisons.
• prune removes null values while prune_empty removes null and empty strings—perfect for tidying user input.

Field level helpers

• extract, fields, getColumn, getColumns, mapColumns, iterateColumns target nested keys in arrays or objects without verbose loops.
• group, indexBy, joinRecords, and hidrate help you reshape datasets into trees, keyed maps or domain objects in a single expression.

Serialization & compatibility

• serialize, unserialize, __serialize, __unserialize ensure forward- compatible persistence.
• join converts arbitrarily nested values into a PowerString, stringifying objects and arrays in a readable JSON form.

The entire API is designed for method chaining so you can describe your intent at a high level and only drop down to native arrays when you call all().

A tour of PowerString

PowerString takes the same philosophy to text processing. Wrap your string via PowerString::of() or the PS() helper and unlock a Unicode-aware toolkit:

Creation & mutation

• append, prepend, concat, repeat, replace, substr, substring, slice, trim, trimLeft, trimRight, toLowerCase, toUpperCase let you manipulate strings without juggling offsets.

Inspection & navigation

• charAt, charCodeAt, length, count, includes, startsWith, endsWith, indexOf, lastIndexOf, indexOfPattern, search provide familiar ergonomics with multibyte safety.
• Pattern helpers (match, splitByPattern) transparently upgrade your regexes to Unicode mode and optionally capture global matches.

Interoperability

• split returns a PowerArray for downstream transformations.
• Array-style indexing works ($string[0], isset($string[5]), unset($string[1])).
• normalize (if the intl extension is available) unifies Unicode sequences.

Convenience helpers

Short global functions live in src/globals.php:

• PA($array) / asPA(&$array) / toPA(&$var) for array wrappers.
• PS($string) / asPS(&$string) / toPS(&$var) for string wrappers.

They make quick scripting or prototyping a breeze:

Comparing to procedural PHP

Traditional helpers often look like this:

With Power Primitives the same intent reads like a story:

Each method describes what you want, not the low-level mechanics of how to obtain it. Tests in this repository guard every method, so you can chain with confidence.

Running the tests

The project ships with a deterministic, dependency-free test suite covering the full API surface.

The runner prints a friendly checklist so you immediately know the health of your installation. (CI environments can simply check for an exit code of 0.)

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome! The codebase embraces strict types, PHP 8 features and thoughtful documentation. Please run php tests/run.php before submitting patches.

License

Power Primitives is open-source software licensed under the MIT license.